At 10:20 last Monday morning I sat at a table outside of Tucson, Arizona, writing these words: The land does not move, frozen to our eyes. Within a minute or two, a small but notable earthquake struck outside of the almost-ghost town of Bedrock, Colorado, 600 miles away. It was 4.5 on the Richter scale. […]
Craig
I spend too much time on the computer. I’m doing it right now. Between files, tabs, and docs, I keep up Google Earth — when it doesn’t crash — catching by accident out of the corner of my cluttered desktop a bolt of a mesa or a canyon’s shadow. I click on it like taking […]
We’ve had a number of cats around here over the last year, roamers and strays. Two we brought in and three, the feral ones, came on their own. A little more than a year ago, a barn cat showed up at a friend’s ranch an hour from where we live in southwest Colorado. It was […]
I attended a repatriation of artifacts and bones under Native American claim recently. The remains of 41 people and the artifacts buried with them, retrieved from an archaeological collection, went back in the ground. There’s not a lot I can write in detail. Returning the dead of a millennia-old village is an involved procedure and […]
I walked along the beach a few days ago a quarter mile landward of the San Andreas fault zone. Surfers were swimming out and riding the curls back on the west side of San Francisco. Sets picked them up over the Pacific Plate and swept them onto North America. A hundred feet below, the […]
This piece originally ran a year ago, Sept 22, 2018. Right now I’m in the bowels of the Grand Canyon, sending up a flare of a redux. I often think back to this story, especially when violence swells in the world. This is one small antidote. I was with a group kayaking and camping on […]
You know it’s bad when you have to dig a hole and crawl in to survive. That’s what is going on in a creek bed at the bottom of the canyon below where I live. The creek stopped running a little more than a week ago. I walked down the other day and lifted […]
We were walking through meadows of dry grass on our way to a friend’s house when I stopped with my gal in a lone ponderosa grove where I once lived. I showed her what had been my porch and the place where I had a wood stove, all of it gone now. My front door […]